'i'm probably non-binary but i have to work in the morning'

some quick thoughts on gender and labour

screenshots sent by a dear friend.

I’ve been applying for jobs lately. It’s not something I’ve had to do for a while, and not something I thought I would have to do. Teaching is one of those rare, peculiar, precious careers that you can still stay in for life - if you can stand it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stand it, and so I find myself filling in applications and trying to find sensible shoes ready for interviews. It’s been seven years since I last did this, and quite a lot has changed about me.

Each application form I fill in offers me a slightly different set of options, a slightly different paradigm within which to present myself. A different set of titles in the drop-down menu. A different set of genders in the gender field. A name, either ‘legal’ or ‘preferred’. I make my own calculations too; how closely does this job connect to my teacher identity, the name and persona in which I am qualified and registered and validated? How much friction will there be if I insist on being called something different? Is it worth it? Is there space, in the minds and administrative frameworks of those to whom I make my applications, for someone who wants to be called what I am called, seen as I want to be seen, while looking the way that I look?

This is not to say that it is uniquely difficult to be trans and apply for a job. Being ‘mid-transition’ and trying to decide which snapshot of my wild and precious life to give to a potential employer is difficult, sure - but really, it only brings to the fore the absurdity of all job applications under late capitalism. Trans or otherwise, we all have to package ourselves into palatable little products, punch up our exploitable potential into a plausible narrative. A bit of gender is just an added complication, an extra note in an already humiliating ritual.

‘I’m probably non-binary but I have to work in the morning’ means, in part, that it is hard to be non-binary at work. That you might be non-binary now, but there’s no framework, no paradigm, through which you’ll be understood as such in the morning, when you have to put on [a shirt and tie / a sensible blouse and heels]. But it also means that it is hard to be non-binary now, even at your leisure, as long as work is looming in the morning. It means work has exhausted you so much that there is no space, no light, no freedom for doing anything as whimsical as exploring a gender. Yes, work keeps us trapped in the binary with drop-down menus and dress codes, but it does more than that - it saps the energy we could otherwise be using for creation of all kinds, gender exploration included.

As Paul B. Preciado puts it, it’s not gender exploration that’s exhausting, it’s conforming to everything capitalism and heteropatriarchy demands of us:

In itself, gender transition is easier to accomplish than going to school every day throughout the long years of childhood and adolescence, easier than a faithful monogamous marriage, easier than pregnancy and childbirth, easier than starting a family, easier than finding a rewarding full-time job, easier than being happy in a consumer society, easier than growing old and being shut away in a retirement home.¹

It’s not just a case of ‘if only the application forms had more gender options’, or ‘if only workplaces had flexible dress codes’. That would only postpone the problem. It’s more like, what if I didn’t have to offer up a plausible narrative sketch of myself, over and over, to someone who does not care and wishes only to exploit me, for a chance at the means of survival? That’s a ‘what if’ that applies to all of us.

1. Can the monster speak? trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021. p.40